“Beverly Gray nails both sides of the complex Corman, the tame and the wild, the cheap and the generous…” Chuck Griffith, screenwriter for Little Shop of Horrors

Roger Corman reigns as the godfather of independent filmmaking. Since 1954, Corman has produced four-hundred-plus movies on shoestring budgets, making a profit on nearly every one. Filling his frames with blood-sucking vampires, rampaging biker gangs, vigilante strippers, and abducting aliens, he has shown the world how to blend action, sex, humor, and social message into hip entertainments. He has also demonstrated an uncanny eye for talent, jumpstarting the Hollywood careers of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and James Cameron, to name just a few. Over the past half-century, Corman has evolved into as a role model for independent-minded filmmakers. Thanks to a campaign spearheaded by alumni of what’s often called “The Roger Corman Graduate School of Film,” he was honored with an Oscar statuette in 2009. It was an fitting valedictory, but Roger himself is still going strong, churning out monster movies and updated versions of old-school exploitation flicks.

Beverly Gray, Corman’s story editor for nearly a decade, learned from the master how to tell a lively tale. Through far-reaching conversations with over one hundred of her fellow Cormanites, she takes you behind the cameras for an insider’s look at the man and the mogul. The result is a rich portrait of this soft-spoken showbiz giant, whose genial manner masks a complex psyche.

The new ebook edition of Gray’s now-classic Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers has been fully updated, bringing the Corman saga into the present day. Previously suppressed material has been restored, and a new collection of photographs enhances this edition.

Gray’s sensitive combination of scholarly detachment and firsthand observation have made [Corman] come alive in all his wily brilliance.

Beverly Gray’s long tenure with Roger Corman gave her extraordinary access to many of his former associates. Ms. Gray has been an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California and an instructor for UCLA Extension’s screenwriting program. She is currently a freelance journalist for several publications including the Hollywood Reporter. She resides in Los Angeles.

For 200 years, the hero’s magic pen has been passed on from generation to generation. The newest hero is Alice Goodenough, an 18-year-old junior from Washington High School. While her friends spent their summer working and having fun, Alice found herself doing battle with creatures most human beings don’t even realize exist. A giant snake. A blood-sucking prince. A terrifying half-man, half-hedgehog. Dastardly dwarfs intent on mind-controlling everyone.

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